One of the perks of being a (mostly) freelance writer — always a change of scenery. I do a lot of my work out-and-about, at various places on the Westside of Los Angeles. My writer-friends are always asking me what I think of certain spots so I figured, what the heck, why I don’t just review them all? First up is the Coffee Bean on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, which is not to be confused with the Coffee Bean on South Beverly Drive (just a few blocks away) or the one on Beverly Blvd (about a mile away).

Location: Heart of “downtown” Beverly Hills on the corner of N. Beverly Dr. and Little Santa Monica Blvd. (Do people still call it Little Santa Monica? Or is just South Santa Monica now, which is confusing because it runs parallel to North Santa Monica?)

Parking: It’s near two city-run garages that offer free parking for up to 2 hours before 6pm. Nice.

Seating: By my count, at least 20+ inside. Another 10+ outside. In total, 8 two-tops, two “lounge-y” areas with more plush seating, one larger table that three or four people could sit around, and two bars. One is a communal “power bar” that seats 7 with individual outlets for every seated patron. There’s also a slimmer bar against the wall that sits another half-dozen people who don’t care about power (or having their backs stared at by people waiting for their drinks).

Food & Drink: Same selection as any other Coffee Bean as far as I could tell.

Typical Customer: Appears to be mostly people who don’t want to wait in line at the more crowded Starbucks across the street. The power bar attracts laptop wielders willing to sacrifice space for some much needed juice.

Amenities: Public bathroom. Lots of the aforementioned electrical sockets.

Wifi: Typical Coffee Bean wifi (i.e. requires a passcode that is readily visible on their infotainment screen). At 11:50am on a Monday, with two laptop users, a guy on an iPad, and a couple smartphones appearing to be on the network, the download speed was 4.38Mbps. I haven’t run this official speed test anywhere else yet, but based on personal experience, I have a feeling it’ll beat the other coffeehouses in the neighborhood (two Starbucks, a Peet’s, and another Coffee Bean). The upload was a dismal 0.51Mbps. So don’t plan on Skyping, but you know what? You should never Skype at a coffeehouse anyway. It’s tacky and hogs the bandwidth. Also worth mentioning: My Dropbox folder had no trouble syncing over the wifi, but my Google Drive folder was “unable to connect.”

Music: Currently playing “Dig A Little Deeper” by Peter Bjorn and John.

Distinguishing Trait: The gas fireplace fully encased in glass that produces no heat. Any perceived warmth comes from the emptiness of your soul (or the people sitting around you, as around it are the most popular places to sit).

Ability to do work here: Pretty good, actually. There’s almost always seating, and because it’s never all that crowded, it’s never all that loud. If you have a meeting anywhere in Beverly Hills and want to get some work done before or after, this is an excellent choice.

As both a follow-up to 2011’s Rise of Planet of the Apes and spin-off of AMC’s Mad Men, this hybrid sequel/prequel/reboot/off-shoot is as loud as it is contemplative. Initial fears of Apes franchise fans (“Apies” as they like to be called) that the inclusion of Don Draper was nothing more than a crass attempt by cynical Hollywood execs to appeal to the Asian youth market prove to be unfounded. The story of a group of primates who team up with a legendary ad man to subjugate the remnants of humanity is a universal tale that, much like the titular Don, transcends time and space. Director Reeves deftly melds the two juggernaut franchises into a singular epic so seamless, you will shit your pants. Domestic returns should be strong and Jon Hamm’s immense popularity among North Korean adolescents should only bolster the film’s international box office to boot.

It’s June, which means TV writers’ rooms for the next season are opening for business. Most of the people in those rooms are veteran writers who (hopefully) need no advice. A lucky few are first-time writers who will need a lot of advice, but they’ll get none from me. (Y’all are on your own.*) No, this post is for the other people who make their living in a TV writers’ room; the true, unsung heroes of television. The Writers’ Assistants.

Okay, it’s a less a “trick” than a standard feature of Mac computers (and I’m assuming PCs as well), but it’s something most people don’t know about.

First off, you shouldn’t rely too heavily on ellipses in general, but they have their purpose. The problem is that a single ellipsis adds three characters to the last word in your sentence, and three characters is sometimes one or two too many, creating “orphan words” that push into the next line.

One unexpected fruit of the internet: a million blogs dedicated to recapping every episode of every TV show currently on the air. Throw in all the people devoting their free time/lives to reexamining old episodes of Buffy, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Doctor Who, and you’ve got approximately 1 trillion web pages all devoted to one thing: Telling People What They Already Saw.

The AVClub, HitFix, TelevisionWithoutPity, and Entertainment Weekly — among countless other sites — have all figured out how to monetize the desperate need for TV addicts to have their opinions verified through consensus. No show is too small to be covered, no detail is too small to be obsessed over. Thanks to the explosion of the TV echo-chamber, never before has so much attention been given to the process of making television.

I overdid it with the blur tool around the neck, but overall not bad for five minutes of work, no? The hardest part was filling in Worf’s head, since the only image I had that’d work was cut off just above the eyebrows.

All around L.A. are billboards and posters for the new Ice Cube/Kevin Hart movie “Ride Along.” It looks like it could be pretty funny, but I just can’t get past the tagline the marketers chose: “Propose to this cop’s sister? Rookie mistake.”

Henceforth, I vow that whenever I see a movie poster with the word “rookie” on it, I’ll change it to wookie and alter the cast accordingly.

If you’ve ever been to Los Angeles and turned on the TV at noon, 6, or 11pm, you might’ve noticed something “different” about the people delivering you the local news, sports, and weather. Their lips are plumper. Their bods are buffer. Their boobs are much, much, larger. They frequently look like the porn version of what a local newscaster should look like. Don’t believe me? Here’s a quiz for you:

Marty McFly. John McClane. Sarah Connor. Axel Foley. Riggs & Murtaugh. All are 80s movie characters that quickly became household names. Rambo and Indiana Jones became so iconic so fast, the sequels to First Blood and Raiders of the Lost Ark bore their names. Even 80s movies that weren’t box office champs produced characters with names still recognizable today. Snake Plissken. Lloyd Dobbler. Spicoli.